Weekly eNews

From the Head of the Crowther Centre – Dr Ray Swann

Beauty is truth, truth beauty ­–Keats

Next Monday we are thrilled that James Kerr (author of Legacy) is coming to work with student leadership, coaches and to talk to the community. As many of you would know, James has written about many of the high performing organisations (including the All Blacks) and works as a consultant, author and story teller.

Several years ago, we reached out to James to see if he might be interested in helping us develop our School culture through enabling the boys to express their views and values through some of the processes that we had read about in his book Legacy. Ideas like ‘no one person is bigger than the whole’ which the All Blacks express as ‘sweep the sheds’ (where the leaders literally sweep the sheds after the game), or the idea when you pass the ball you enable someone else to grow. Popular culture teaches the boys to focus on the self, but the idea of passing the ball to someone else is profound for a young boy. He starts to see that enabling others (and hence the rule of reciprocity) is actually the way high performing organisations work.

In 2016, we began the Legacy Project in earnest. We felt that we wanted to further personalise and contextualise the legacy thinking process to our own School (and go further than what we had read in the book). Would James be interested to help us, and possibly share this message more broadly with other schools, including those that weren’t perhaps as rich in tradition, ritual and the inherent connection to purpose as Brighton Grammar? Could we be a leading school in building a high performance culture using these cutting edge principles? James said he would, and has gifted the School many hours of advice, spoken directly to the student leaders and helped to amplify ‘voice’ (I have previously written about voice here).

As we build a community, as we help our boys to join, to enrol and to be part of something special, we have been so fortunate to have had some incredible student leaders like Andy McGrath (OB 2016), Ben Durkin (OB 2017), Brad Marais (OB 2018). These Captains have understood the idea that ‘you plant trees you don’t see grow for the benefit of the community’; they have been safe hands in creating a culture of welcoming, establishing a creed, a culture of ‘As One’. This year, we are excited to learn more about ‘Unlock the Dance’ with Captain Noah and his team. This is a brilliant idea and what this means for the school at an individual and group level could be very transformational.

Crowther Parent Workshop Program

James Kerr – The BGS Legacy Project

James is the author of global bestseller Legacy: What the All Blacks can teach us about the business of life. On Monday 25 March at 7.00pm, James will be speaking at BGS about effective leadership, performance and legacy. This presentation is free for the BGS community and I encourage you to bring your Secondary School sons.

We are delighted to announce that we will again be hosting the internationally renowned psychologist Megan de Beyer and her program ‘Strong Mothers, Strong Sons’. Megan ran this workshop at BGS last year and received extremely positive feedback.